The language of women
By Tracy Sorensen
An article in the Peking-based China Daily, reported by Graham Hutchings in the British Daily Telegraph on October 9, gave a fascinating account of a 1000-year-old language devised and used exclusively by women. The following is an abridged version of the Hutchings story.
Nushu could be called the first language of women's liberation because it was used secretly to criticise sexual inequalities in imperial China. For almost 1000 years, nushu was used by women in a remote area of western Hunan, a traditionally poor province south of the Yangtse.
Serious study of the script did not begin until the early 1950s, when a retired official began to translate it into standard Chinese. But his efforts fell foul of repeated political campaigns. In the '50s and '60s, those who could read and write the script were called "sorcerers", and the script itself "evil writing".
When research began again 30 years later, scholars had difficulty finding anyone still proficient in the language. A dozen or so women in their 70s and 80s were found who could read nushu, and only three could write it. Two of those three have since died, leaving Yang Huanyi, 83, the only person in Hunan's Jiangyong county who can still communicate using the script.
Legend has it that nushu was created by Jiangyong, a beautiful woman who became concubine to an emperor of the Song dynasty (960-1279), living a lonely life in the palace, forbidden outside contact.
"In the palace, Jiangyong was desperately homesick, and longed for communication with her sisters and friends", China Daily said. "Since any contact with outside people was forbidden without the emperor's permission, she wrote letters with linear characters that would not be understood by the men at court."
The major part of nushu, known as sanzhaoshu, contains poems and articles written by intimate friends of a woman at a female get-together three days after her wedding. The writings recall how happy the woman was before her wedding, and the sense of loss her friends felt now that she was moving to live with her husband's family.
It pointed out the unfairness of a woman having to leave her loved ones while the husband could remain with his family.
Other texts were in the form of letters between "sworn sisters". A book based on the researches, Collection of Women's Scripts, is to be published in November.